Why does HN give karma points for submitting articles?
That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures something.
If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said again and see if they were actually right.
Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?
I seldom comment on HN, and when I do I typically do so in threads that are somewhat dormant, with little activity. I don't really care about karma/votes at all, I just say something when I think I have something of value to add. My comment average is 1.7, but I would still like to believe that I have yet to exhibit any behavior that I'm just angry at the world. I hope that I could still get yours or others attention, even though I'm not such a high-ranking commenter.
Agreed. I find karma average of little interest. Unfortunately it does encourage a certain type of bad behavior in those who do. I can appreciate what pg is trying to achieve with it, but I don't think it's helped the site, and in fact has perhaps detracted from some conversations that "could have happened" except the people came late to the thread.
I personally sometimes won't bother commenting on a low comment simply because there is little chance of an interesting coversation happening there.
The other thing that's messed up now is duplicate submission. They should be forbidden again. Find a way to get the duped article to the front page if we're trying to make sure it's seen (maybe with a different decay constant), but allowing the resubmission takes away the original conversation.
First, I hope my upvote just gave your average a bit of a boost.
Second, you'll need to produce a bit more anger and irrationality before anybody starts labeling you as a troll :)
Frankly, the only time I ever check anybody's profile is when they say something really valuable or really obnoxious. So by the time I get there I've pretty much made up my mind about the character of the individual in question. I can't imagine forming an opinion of somebody based solely on their karma score on some website.
Thanks. That comment was my biggest hitting one ever, so my average will probably jump quite a bit. Funny that it should be in a meta-karma thread.
I do see what you mean, I didn't think you were discarding comments from low karma commenters. I mostly wanted to bring up a point that is often missed in these discussions, that karma points might be very dependent on not only participation and quality, but on timing.
Given that using average karma as a filter is so blunt, an alternative way to express your method would be "I might see a high average karma as a reason to re-evaluate a comment that I initially discarded". Then it would be even harder to misconstrue into something sinister and karma elitist as I did :)
* Edit: from the comment below by mrduncan that shows how average calculation is done, my previous comment will not affect my average a lot. The max comment is sensibly ignored as a potential outlier.
When I comment my goal is to have the most Karma per thread.
In some ways its very Karmic in that my goal is to maximize all users Karma over my own individual Karma. I get really excited when a comment of mine results in multiple 20+ Karma comments because that means I'm really contributing.
OK, now I'm confused. The average karma on my HN profile is blank. After reading "hey, the average karma score is gone"[1] I thought that HN had done away with it, but now I see that pretty much everyone has an average karma except me. Could it be because I have only comments but no submissions?
It's limited by time and other factors. If you haven't commented on anything for a considerable time then there aren't enough values to average.
I think it works like this: Take the last N values from the last T time, discard the largest (and perhaps the smallest) and compute the average of what's left. If there aren't enough, don't bother.
For more details, read the code. It's available here somewhere ...
You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Most people submit articles in some part because they receive karma points for interesting submissions. It's not just by magic that good articles "tend to find their way here."
The good articles arent the issue though, maybe we need some sort of penalty on bad articles that would prevent people posting anything and everything hoping at least something will catch on.
I'm not much one for game theory, but this just came to mind.
Maybe we shouldn't penalize articles that don't gain attention, but it should have a determined negative score in the back end, while displaying 0 or 1 to users on the front end. The initial score could be calculated somehow through the karma (or possibly comment karma average) of the submitter and length of time the submitter has been a member of HN.
When a newer, but established, user submits an article, it could need up to 15 upvotes before it actually starts gaining the user karma/points, for example. The score could then start to adjust to it's actual total as it becomes more active.
My only issue with actually penalizing articles that don't get attention is because some articles may be submitted a few times over the course of a day from different sources, yet the later submitted ones in what I have unscientifically observed seem to be the most active. The actual information in the article is completely relevant, but due to whatever probabilistic cause, they just don't get noticed. I don't think it's "right" to penalize a submitter because no one else was on the ball, so to speak.
Your right, maybe it has to be about average score. People are going to submit good stuff that doesn't catch on. The only real behavior your trying to avoid is people submitting regardless of quality.
Surfacing good links is part of the attraction of HN. Taking away the karma benefit for link sharing would lessen the incentive to share articles that don't actually need any discussion.
Lately, I see we don't give points for meaningfulness more than for popularity.
Perhaps we could measure meaningfulness by the size of the tree of replies and assign karma according to that. That would even solve the post-to-upvote ratio problem.
I just don't know what to do with the downvote-for-disagreement thing. Not everyone regard it as a problem, but I'm not sure I agree.
The very best submissions get virtually no discussion.
One measurement to make might be the votes divided by comments.
Let V = votes
Let C = comments
Let IT = 1.0
Let R = V/C
If R > IT then the article is "worth IT"
Let "the paper it's written on" be 0.1.
If R < "the paper it's written on" then it's not worth the paper it's written on (not that it's written on paper, but you get the idea).
But all this is tinkering around the edges, and doesn't feel like it's significant. Perhaps a new model of how a site like this works at all is necessary.
"The very best submissions get virtually no discussion."
I'm not sure I agree with you on that. The best stories produce a high volume of high-quality discussion. Your proposed algo punishes submissions that generate discussion, which seems to be the opposite of what's desirable.
I have to agree with RiderOfGiraffes -- an article with a high number of comments relative to points usually indicates that the article is more opinionated than informative, since most everyone who upvoted it posted their personal reaction to it. Although they are popular, I feel these are usually low-value articles and discussions.
Additionally, it's very hard to have a high-quality discussion that is also high-volume. Once an article's comments get over several pages long, you can be sure that most commenters are not reading everything before commenting, so you get a lot of similar comments. Sometimes this is valuable (e.g. "Ask HN"), but most of the time it just worsens the signal-to-noise ratio.
Maybe we just need a semantic distinction between editorials (opinion pieces) and articles (investigative/fact-laden pieces)? Perhaps make editorials count for less, in the same way self-posts currently do?
I think those good stories that generate good discussion still get more points than comments. With the really good stories, no matter how many people comment, more people upvote, because there are lurkers.
It's not perfect, but I'm finding it a pretty good predictor.
Judging meaningfulness by the size of the tree won't work. Looking at which threads have a large number of replies, that's more of an indicator of controversialness.
Perhaps you could implement a cost-refund system where it costs x karma to submit an article. If that article receives x number of upvotes, then you get them all back -- otherwise, they're gone.
For each subsequent article following a situation in which you did not get refunded, the cost doubles.
So, the scenario would be like this:
- new users can submit articles after they've attained 5 karma points, which are spent upon submission.
- If the article gets upvoted 5 times, the karma is refunded, and the cost is still 5 karma to submit.
- If the article does not get upvoted 5 times (or is flagged more than upvoted, or whatever) then the user loses the karma cost, and their next submission costs 10 karma. If the user doesn't have 10 karma, they can't submit.
There is a low entry cost, and good submissions aren't penalized, while bad or negative submissions are penalized progressively. There is no point at which the user is 'banned', but they have to earn progressively more and more karma to keep submitting. For high-karma users, this should allow them the luxury of gambling some karma on things they want shown, while lower-karma members have to be more mindful of whether they think this is worth gambling their karma on.
The problem is that increasing costs for unpopular content doesn't necessarily mean that your content was bad, just that people weren't paying attention to it. If you're ahead of a tech curve, that doesn't mean your contributions are bad per se. It means that other people didn't appreciate them at the time.
So if you do implement a system like that you're basically codifying the herd mentality much more strictly than it probably should be.
Well, the hope would be to reduce the signal to noise ratio, so, in the event that something less popular comes up, it should have more time to be seen and appreciated.
I would also venture that 'cutting edge' is HN's bailiwick, and therefore, it's really hard to get ahead of the tech curve here.
Ha. Don't tell the guys at Lambda the Ultimate that ;)
Incidentally, i submitted a link (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ) about an hour ago, and after watching it depressingly fall off the first page of the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting a link to HN again.
What's so frustrating is that i can identify content that is good, and relevant (the link above is about open data, citizen access to data, and information management), which are obviously relevant to the hacker news community.
But the only ways i can think to remedy this would be to either lobby my friends hard to vote up the link (something i'm loathe to do), or start pimping the links on other sites, in the hopes that people will try to submit it, see the existing link, and vote it up.
There's just no way i can do better than a piece of content like this. Oh well. I guess i'll stick to commenting.
> i submitted a link ... about an hour ago, and after
> watching it depressingly fall off the first page of
> the new list, i think i'm giving up on ever submitting
> a link to HN again.
> What's so frustrating is that i can identify content
> that is good, and relevant (the link above is about
> open data, citizen access to data, and information
> management), which are obviously relevant to the
> hacker news community.
Maybe it's just me, but I submit that you are mistaken. For example, I saw it, and it is of zero interest to me. I write code for a living, I manage people who write code, I run two companies, one of which produces code, and I don't think it's of interest.
That doesn't mean it's of zero interest to everyone. That doesn't mean it should be of zero interest to everyone. It does mean that you are mistaken in your belief that founders and hackers would be interested, if only they'd seen it.
I appreciate the POV. At the risk of litigating a separate issue, i think you're wrong. Aside from people who care about big data, information gathering and management by the government is a big deal for journalists, people who interact with the government, and ultimately tax payers.
You're going to fall into at least one of those categories, and i think that hackers in particular are going to fall into multiple of those categories (that i happen to know from personal experience).
But if you didn't think it was relevant, then i certainly don't think you're obligated to upvote. :)
I think you misunderstand me. What the Government does with your data, and what it doesn't do, is big news, of great interest, to everyone.
And that's my point.
It should be of interest to everyone, and it's got nothing specifically related to being a hacker, being a founder, running a project, or other technical issues that are the point, purpose and focus of this community.
Or once were.
And before someone trots out the "satisfies intellectual curiosity" line from the guidelines let me just say no, it doesn't, and if you think it does then you have a very different concept of "intellectual" from mine.
So I'm not saying it's uninteresting in general, I'm saying it's uninteresting to this community as I understand it ought to be.
And in consequence it's clear that you have a different understanding about with this community ought to be. Maybe I'm now out-of-date, and it's changed into something with which I don't share significant overlap.
Well, i note that we joined hacker news within 40 days of each other. Given that, i'd hazard to say we at least have some similar sense of what the community is (although obviously there's an element of self selection in terms of what we read and contribute to).
At the same time, if you don't find the generalist argument persuasive, i'd fall back on the point i skipped previously, which is that this is of direct interest to data geeks. One of the major information brokers, which is interesting both as an individual instance, and as a representative of all large information brokers is fundamentally broken internally.
This is a data processing and scaling issue laid out in a way that should make us ask what's wrong, and what it is that can be done to fix these sorts of problems.
Put more succinctly, this is a problem in our domain.
information gathering and management by the government is a big deal for journalists, people who interact with the government, and ultimately tax payers
I think you're getting into a long-deplored mailing-list tendency for people to ascribe general attributes to their community based on personal preference. "I like ice-cream, lots of other people probably like ice cream, so it's a good post for HN." Journalistic feature-creep, if you will.
My point being that yes, we are all tax-payers more or less, but that doesn't mean everything paid for with tax revenues is germane. Syllogistic posting rationales tend to cast a wider and wider umbrella, sometimes venturing into the realm of slippery slopes.
Actually, i typically err far on the other side. There are many pieces of information that i read hours or days before they appear here or in other social media aggregators, and that has lead me to the impression that i should be contributing more.
Additionally, i do feel that i have some sense of the hacker news demographic having both been a part of it, and watching the sort of content that does generate discussion.
So i'm cognizant of the problem, and i'd like to think that gives me at least some ability to compensate from the bias.
I've had a number of submission woes that mirror yours. Just KNOWING that people would like it if they saw it (right or wrong,) but seeing how quickly things move from newest to gone is the big worry.
The only cure I know for that is to lower the signal to noise ratio, and I don't know a better way to do it than to make submissions harder, or at least, more chancy for the shotgun-submission approach.
If every submission is something that people care about, then I believe (again, right or wrong) that more people are going to be willing to hit the 'newest' page instead of waiting for things to hit the home page, and there should be far fewer submissions.
Of course, this is all predicated on the assumption that auto-post bots are dumb, and that they'll lose you more karma if it's penalized than you gain, but that's an assumption I can't really stand behind, not having seen the numbers.
Please keep submitting. Honestly, what does well on the HN is stuff that grabs people. There are two ways to do that:
1) Match peoples' interests
2) Write really really well
So, you can either submit articles like "BubbleTwit (YC '08) gets $14B in funding, announces Natalie Portman is new CEO" or you can just keep writing and writing and writing until you get really good.
I'm mostly suggesting this because it's what I wish I would do. I'm not that good yet.
I peeked at your post... I think it is a fascinating subject, but your title and opening paragraph don't work that well. "Sustainable" doesn't mean anything without context. Your opening paragraph doesn't really create any kind of desperate need. What is the specific crash going to look like? Paint us a picture of destruction, and then lead us out of it. Great writing grabs people and holds their faces in front of something real.
I don't doubt that you've got real things to show people, so just keep working on the craft, and you'll get there.
There are many submissions that I read on the new page that I like, but aren't something I want in my saved list forever. I don't know if many other people treat article upvotes as I do, but it might explain part of the difficulty.
The problem with this is what it will do to the comments on the article. There have been many times where I have an idea for a comment that I know will get me karma, but I don't think that it really belongs on HN, so I don't submit it. Since I don't have that much karma, if this system was in place I very possibly submit the comment so I could submit more articles later.
I like the system on Reddit where link karma and comment karma is separated. That way, people whose main incentive to post links is to gain karma still get it, but it's also easy to see the karma gained on commenting. In my opinion, it's the best of both worlds.
Submitting good articles is definitely of value, so HN should give out Karma for it. However, I believe because articles cannot be downvoted, there is no risk involved for spam bots and spammy humans alike. The solution seems simple: allow downvoting on articles that are younger than one hour. And add captcha for submissions.
In the scheme I'm trying, it costs you karma to upvote or downvote, which gets converted to non-spendable clout. You get a small portion of karma everyday, which increases as you have more clout (and followers, another aspect I added). If you have spent all your karma, you cannot submit stories until you earn some. Here I was trying to limit the effect of users that are new, and of those that have not contributed appreciated content or comments.
That said, you've got me rethinking the idea of karma for submissions... It might be better to have submissions only increase clout. -Therefore, it will only slightly increase a user's karma-earning rate. Good comments will be the best way to get karma. Yes. I am going to try that. Thanks!
To downvote on SO you need a certain number of points, which you get by doing other activities [like posting or answering questions]. After reaching that threshold, you can choose to downvote a question or response, which costs you one point and costs the other person 2 points. I.e. If you wanted to downvote this post, i would lose 2 karma and you would lose 1.
Also: why does anyone care about kharma? I look at votes on a comment or an article, but I don't really care how much kharma any person has. Do people really look at it as something to maximize?
The only time I have taken karma in to consideration is when I disagree with someone either in principle or in technical merit. If I were to even respond to such a post, I want to know if I am dealing with a troll or someone who is a highly regarded member of the community because they have earned their karma. Basically, I let it influence how I might approach someone to a certain extent. Other than that, I could care less what my or anyone else's karma is.
Rather than karma/comments I'd like to see karma/uniques. Keep count of the logged in users that have seen the comment. Use a little Javascript to figure out which comments have been visible in their browser window long enough to read them.
This could be avoid by giving karma points till 10 up votes on story. After that all up votes on story doesn't give any karma advantage. Still showing up votes on story make sense not karma advantage to submitter.
It just foolish that some high profile story give someone lots of karma advantage then good commenters because someone submitted it first.
Honestly, using the word "karma" to refer to votes just sounds arrogant. Real karma has nothing to do with human opinions, and any system that claims to quantize or measure it probably does more to encourage petty politics.
Indeed: to reward quality over quantity you'd need to use a function such as x^2, or probably x^2/C for some constant C.
Interestingly, Oxford University used to mark final exams for Mathematics and associated schools (such as Computer Science) in this way. Questions would typically start with parts that were largely "book work" and move on to parts that required more careful thought. In addition, you could answer as many questions as you like. Therefore, to avoid people getting lots of marks by just answering all the book work, the papers were scored by squaring the scores for each question and then summing those squares.
That is: overall_score = sum(q in Questions | score(q)^2)
This practice stopped in ~2003 (now you can still answer as many as you like, but the mark for the paper is the sum of your top 3 marks for individual questions, so it's only really worth answering 3 as well as you can).
Someone who submits only for the karma can already make lots of mediocre submissions and boost their karma far more than under a logarithmic scale.
The only case I could see where your point is valid is if "karma abusers" withhold lower quality submissions in the hopes that they'll submit a really popular one. Do you know if they do this? Or am I misunderstanding the rationale?
The maths is backwards. To take an example, if I submit two stories under a log2-scaled points system which get four upvotes, then if you submit a single story, that story needs to get 16 upvotes for you to match my karma.
Assuming that people are chasing karma (let's leave why to the side for a second, because I don't understand it either), then it's far more efficient to submit lots of low-scoring stories than to even bother thinking about high-scoring ones.
I'm in favor of karma to remain as it is. Why? When I have some long thoughts to share I break it off into it's own thorough post and submit it. I thought that was the preferred behavior around here.
However the system relies on upvotes to see good articles from the bad ones.
So the system would still rely on upvotes but perhaps not give karma? #my2cents
FWIW, I was one of the people running a bot to auto-submit. I've always been a big-iron algorithms programmer, and I've never done much web programming, and certainly never programmed an auto-submitter before. Since I figured most of Jacques' idle thoughts were worth more than half the things making it to the Front Page, I figured it was an ideal time to learn a little about the back-n-forth of a form submission system with cookies, and to see (a) what I could learn, (b) how quickly I could learn it, and (c) how little code it took.
So it was an interesting experiment, I'm glad I did it, I'm pleased I learned something from it, and I'm sorry it seems to have caused Jacques some grief.
For that I apologise unreservedly. We have had a chat off-line and I believe there's no on-going problem. I have, of course, disabled the bot.
But the questions raised are interesting. I suggest that the "first submitter gets all the karma" situation means that people submit without thinking, worried that unless they do so they will miss out on that one item that earns gobs of karma, that they saw first, but didn't submit quickly enough.
Just sharing the karma between submitters won't work, because then if someone sees something gaining traction they just submit it themselves and share in the imaginary profits. Simple, clean, clear solution that's wrong.
Agreed. The only downside was that I wasn't in on the joke and that quite a bit of the backlash was directed at me, not at the people running the bots.
I also think that it would be prudent for anybody that intends to run any kind of bot on HN to ask PG for permission.
Perhaps splitting karma between submitters until the item reaches the first page, then. I know I've never managed to be the first submitter of an interesting link; there's always somebody that saw it before me. So normally I don't even think of posting a link.
(Of course, lately, I get the vast majority of my interesting reading from here anyway, but still...)
I don't blame you for bot-submitting Jacques' stuff. His posts are always good and - after all - always hit first page at a dead run. People here do actually find them interesting.
I had somebody recently launch into me with a vitriolic attack on HN (they deleted the comment almost immediately) which started with something like "I know you probably think you're special, what with 18K karma and all, but..."
People take this karma thing waaaay too seriously.
I know I find the site dangerously distracting, and a large part of that is watching the up or downvotes on my comments -- it's kind of a realtime indicator of whether I have my finger on the pulse of the community. So I'm as much to blame as others.
I've said a few times that somebody should monetize this karma nonsense. Set up an auction clearing house where karma can be auctioned off for cash.
It probably wouldn't amount to much, but it's just the kind of out-of-the-box thing that HN should be messing around with. I'm just trying to guess a number, but I think you could pull 5 percent off each trade and make a nice bit of chump change, without changing the look and feel of HN at all. (If it bothers purists or interferes with the running of the board, then simply keep a separate list of "natural" karma hidden from everybody and use that for the system stuff)
The karma matters precisely because it can't be bought (not in any ordinary way, at least). It represents peer acclaim (or conformity to groupthink). If it was bought and sold, the basis for its value would evaporate.
You can easily get karma, if you know how to game HN and the users.
If you post anything in a thread with a clear bias towards something, you can just post something in the same vein, and, depending on the popularity, people will upvote the hell out of you.
Another is to just post something in a very popular thread, and you're bound to receive a lot of upvotes. Even people who would normally have been downvoted through the floor would wind up with a lot of karma. (EDIT: The same applies to popular comments: that's why you see so many people responding to it, because they'll earn some extra karma by piggy-backing on the specific comment.)
I think people take karma way too seriously. There isn't any perfect solution except to change your mind set about what the karma is and does. Compared to reddit, HN is much more rewarding, because there aren't idiots who keep downvoting you for no reason other than latent misery and hatred towards mankind, or whatever may possess them. Downvoting sends very bad signals and stifles the incentive to participate in the community a lot, so the comment would need to be very inappropriate to warrant a negative karma score.
The only suggestion I'd like to make is to make per-thread karma inversely proportional to the popularity of the number of thread upvotes, so the comment karma (quality) isn't a function of the number of views in the thread. (Perhaps the same with child comments versus parent comments.)
If pg can do this retroactively, I think we'll already see some interesting changes for the better - albeit no end-all solution.
Or maybe it just represents "points" -- little cookies -- for the user. You can never have too many cookies.
I don't know. That's why I suggested the experiment.
I think the idea that it represents peer acclaim is not very useful, at least to me. I've heard other high karma folks say (and I agree) that probably more than anything it just represents spending too much time online.
It's also valuable because it eventually grants the ability to downvote.
(It's annoying to see obvious trolls and spam sitting at 1 and not be able to do anything about it. I'm still a few hundred points away, unless the threshold has gone up again.)
Two ideas- what do you think?
(1) Keep karma hidden from everyone except the owner of the karma
and/or
(2) Charge a small fee ($10/year) or so to access the site (with certain exceptions to be sure).
The bots are doing nothing 'wrong' as such. There are certain feeds from where >90% of the material ends up on HN. If somebody writes a bot to auto-submit items from that feed, it's helping HN be faster in accessing new and (mostly) relevant posts. What is not relevant should (in principle) not reach the home page.
The problem is that submission is winner takes all, i.e. first submitter reaps all the upvotes. Also, HN does not reward finding new sources of material more than posting from the predictable sources.
The logical endpoint of these two facts is auto-submission bots rising to the top of the Karma tables. If Karma is used as a way of anti-gaming (need karma threshold to downvote, etc.) then this is a way to circumvent that for a sufficiently motivated manipulator. They can make a bot that auto-submits from the known sources, and use it to build up an arbitrary number of accounts, from which they can then boost the articles they want (or bury the comments they don't like). For all we know, this could already be the case.
I have two suggestions that can sidestep this problem to a certain extent:
1. Reward articles from predictable sources less than articles from rare sources.
2. Split the karma benefit between the first submitter and the people who upvoted the article early (of course, this needs to take into account how selectively and successfully the user upvotes to avoid blanket upvoting 'just in case').
This all is still gameable, but probably not as easily.
1. When a link is submitted, it doesn't actually appear on HN until a certain (fixed?) time T has elapsed after its first submission.
2. Everyone who submits it within that time is noted.
3. Karma from article upvotes is shared equally between all those users. (Or perhaps unequally in a way that weights earlier submitters slightly more highly -- but not winner-takes-all as at present.)
4. If the same link has been submitted N times before time T elapses, the delay is truncated at that point.
Effects:
1. There's very little incentive to submit something super-quickly. Therefore, there's more incentive to read it carefully first. (Good.)
3. Submissions no longer have hugely higher potential karma gain than comments, as they do at present. (Good.)
4. "Obvious" submissions probably no longer give anyone very much karma. (Good.)
5. Breaking news doesn't appear on HN as quickly as it does now; but if lots of people are submitting it, it still gets in pretty fast. (Maybe good, maybe bad.)
I think that with suitable choices of T and N -- perhaps 1 hour and 20, or thereabouts -- this would be a considerable improvement on what we have now.
I like this suggestion. Slowing down HN wouldn't be a bad outcome as well; PG has mentioned he doesn't want it to be too addictive.
On the other hand, I'm not clear if would slow things down that much, so much as delay. In any event, this isn't a breaking tech news source for many obvious reasons.
I used to encounter what I thought might be bots auto-submitting my old raganwald blog to reddit. The only person losing karma was me, since I no longer got to submit my articles at a time when they were interesting to reddit's readership. Big whoop!
My thinking is that if I write and give my work away, it is no longer up to me to decide how it is to be used. That's because my words are free as in speech, not just free as in beer. Of course, copyright violations are a different matter, but I can't tell people whether to submit a post to HN, I can't tell people whether to bookmark it, or tweet it, or whether to use it as part of a corpus on guessing the sex of the author.
If there's a race for meaningless karma by bot authors, that is irrelevant to me as an author. IF it is a problem--and I do not grant that it is a problem--THEN it is HN's problem, not my problem as an author.
I give my words away. That inevitably means someone will use it in a way I didn't intend. That's the point.
FWIW, I think there is a problem if multiple bots attempting to autosubmit end up inadvertently creating a voting ring. But that can and should be fixed by changing the way HN treats submitting an article that has already been submitted.
Other than that, I only think bots are a problem for HN when submitting spam rather than ham. I am in favour of bots provided they don't play fast and loose with accounts. I would be ok with each bot having its own account, or all bots using their creator's accounts. I would consider it fraudulent to create bots that periodically give themselves new accounts to evade filtering.
If bots all used a stable account, pg could throttle or ban those that submit too much spam. But if a bot is constantly submitting articles that are upvoted by humans.... I'm happy to see it seed the new page.
JM2C, I don't make the rules, I just play by them.
Maybe the problem is people upvoting uninteresting articles.
Without wanting to be mean, it's kind of crazy that this meta-discussion about someone's inability to remain off the HN scoreboard is number one right now.
Sycophantism and idle self-promotion are boring pursuits.
EDIT: I think we should be able to down-vote uninteresting articles.
Multiple submissions of the same link have the same effect as upvoting and once a thread is on the homepage it will gain a lot more views instantly, if only a small number of people on the homepage then gives it another upvote it is likely to hang around for a long time.
These are artifacts of the way the 'new' and the 'news' page work, the cumulative effect of those is larger than the actual quality of the submissions.
It might be interesting to hide total karma score from users. I guess that if we don't know our total karma score the karma harvesting will stop but keep the points for submissions and comments so there's still the incentive to contribute good material (the pride of seeing your comment/submission being upvoted).
What do you think?
edit: the first version didn't make much sense, I got interrupted in the middle of the message
This is a lesson that was learned on Slashdot in 1999 already I think. A 'karma cap' makes perfect sense and the total karma wouldn't even have to be displayed to the user himself, to avoid karma whoring. What does it matter if someone has 1500 or 15000 karma? They've both proven to be contribute; maybe the one with the higher score just has more time, or a more popular opinion, or has been here longer.
In the same vain, it's not easy enough to lose karma. By being active here, you will in the end always have good karma, even if your contributions are bad; it's very rare to see comments with lower than -5 karma, but it's easy to get a +10 comment, even if it's nothing special (I mean I know I've had a lot of those...)
I quite like the 'karma average' actually. You can argue whether or not it works, but to me, the two highest signal posters (that come to my mind) are grellas and patio11.
They have averages of 26.23 and 18.93, respectively. This, to me, aligns with my expectation that their comments are high value, well thought, and usually worth reading.
Compared to my own measly karma average of 4.57, which is comprised, often, of throwaway remarks and dumb questions, I think it's a fair representation of a user's contribution.
The actual number itself, I agree, is all but meaningless.
A small comment since people are upvoting and I did a rather meaningful edit: I wrote 'it's too easy to lose karma', but I meant (as was elaborated on in the rest of the sentence) that it's too hard to lose karma.
Jacques, perhaps you could configure your blog so you can choose to submit your own posts automatically to HN when you post them? That might reduce the tendency of people to try to rush and post them first, assuming the majority of posts are actually suitable for posting here.
I don't think you should worry too much about it either. Your posts seem to keep gathering a high number of votes whenever they appear on HN, so this is a sign that they are useful and relevant to the community. If an irrelevant link gets posted and it only gathers a few votes on the new page, then what have you lost? What has the community lost?
The problem is that if just 3 people auto-submit the post in the first minute, it's immediately at the top of the front page. Often, many people will reflexively upvote something by jacquesm, so the result is that a top slot on the front page is taken up for some time, perhaps by something that's not really worthy of discussion. This takes away attention from other, more worthy posts. There are only 30 slots on that front page.
This used to happen with 37signals too - I'm glad to see it stopped happening there. Time to stop autosubmitting jacquesm as well!
Ah yes, I had forgotten that resubmission counts as additional votes. I agree - it's not an ideal situation if posts get on the home page purely from automated submissions.
I understand your intentions but I don't think that's a good solution because it will still submit items to the 'news' page that are not always 'up to standards', giving them at least one upvote. That's roughly 25% of what's needed to get an item to the homepage, so only 3 more (bot)votes and it's done, once an article hits the homepage it is likely to stay there for a while. All this would do is add one more bot to the race and thus increase the problem.
Not having those items on the 'news' page would seem to be the best solution.
Really, people should at least read the articles they submit and judge them for content before submitting them to HN, especially when they're associated with the better known (ex)HN'ers.
Probably Sivers, Patio11, Tptacek or any one of the people that seem to be featured a lot here could write an article about 'Condé Nast acquiring HN' (in a desperate move to re-acquire Reddits' audience that has left for HN, thereby realizing the fears of all true Hackers, the proof that this would make 'HN more like Reddit' is left for the reader) (there goes my April 1 post ;)) and it would get upvoted without much consideration.
One possible (technical) solution would be to let the karma boost be dependent on the average of all posts from a domain, submit a 'below average' link and your karma will drop!
I've discovered an elegant proof that HN is like Reddit, but ... oh, darn, that doesn't work online.
Maybe submission upvotes in a short time shouldn't front-page an item. I don't see why not putting these links on the news page should make a difference - if anything it would make it impossible to get non-bot upvotes, if I understand what you mean.
It is interesting that you have the reverse problem of most people that want to draw attention to things on HN. Maybe you should start selling guest spots on your blog :P
I was about to suggest the exact same thing, so I totally agree with the CAPTCHA solution.
And maybe having a (daily?) article submission limit per user at the same time would keep people from submitting articles just for the sake of it.
It crossed my mind allowing users with more karma to have higher submission limits, but that might aswel be gamed at some point by some users.
So perhaps the best thing is having a CAPTCHA to avoid bot submissions and some kind of limit to avoid manual spamming.
Truth is, HN article quality has been slowly declining in the last few months and we keep seeing the same sources over and over again on the front page.
a) It is hard enough to submit from a smartphone already. Much of my news browsing is on my phone while cooking and eating my breakfast.
b) Adding a CAPTCHA at this point seems like a big hammer to solve an small problem, one that was solved by jacquesm (at least this time) via a little detective work and personal contact (thanks for the deft handling of the situation, Jacques).
c) PG already does voting ring detection, it seems like autosubmitbots should be detectable too if this becomes a problem again.
ADDED IN EDIT: HN voting makes me laugh sometimes - I have no idea why this got a downvote. Thank you - made my day.
This is not, let me hasten to add, a request for more. Some things are funny just the once. More than that and I'll really start to question my understanding of the world, let alone just the HN community.
That would at least slow down the bots based on how attentive the maintainers are. There are of course captcha solving services but this just trades maintainer time for money - trying to run a successful karma hoarding bot would still be death by a thousand papercuts.
Submitting content for sake of karma is spamming, no matter who wrote the content. Why not share with others something you think they will find useful or noteworthy? People tend to ask themselves first WIIFM and if they find the benefit, they share. Let us remember that sharing is about others.
Users do have to be logged in to submit articles, so action could be taken against people (or bots) that submitted too many articles that were made dead or did not receive a large number of points.
This is true, but its also true that a lot of times these bots will get to these articles first, and then because they come from a well-known or respected domain, they just get tons of upvotes anyways.
There's two separate problems: too much dead content, which imo, is ok, because the good stuff will usually rise to the top - you need some junk to find the gems; and bots automatically picking up and submitting content - no human discernment as to whether the link is actually HN-worthy. I think the mindlessness is more the issue being addressed here
Building a bot to win karma is a little like hiring a model to pretend to be your date. No, scratch that. We're hackers! Building a bot to win karma is a little like building your own replicant and taking it to the party as your date.
That was the intent of my post. Building a bot that earns 10,000+ karma ought to be an achievement. If for any reason it isn't particularly difficult, then it ought to be taken that earning 10,000+ karma as a human isn't an achievement either.
To me, the technical solution is to incorporate the relationship of the upvoter* to the poster in the "hotness" algorithm. If I upvote every single item from jacquesmatteij.com then my "this is awesome" signal isn't as strong as someone who only upvotes 10%, or who has never upvoted him before.
* When multiple bots submit the same link, "submission" is basically the same thing as "upvoting".
It kind if seems like a false alarm if one of the botters was just RiderOfGiraffes (whose motives I don't suspect), and there was only one other person, possibly equally innocent.
One would hope nobody here is irrational enough to seek 'easy/automatic' karma ... I mean the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.' If there's no real finding involved then what's the point? You're the only person your karma matters to.
> the nice thing about karma for submissions is it's
> basically a whole lot of smart people saying 'well
> done for finding this, it's definitely valuable.'
That doesn't really seem to be the case any more. There's a lot of stuff coming up on the Front Page now that I, personally, think is not valuable at all. It's not spam, so I feel disinclined to flag it, but I can't downvote it either. I think there are a lot of older hands who are starting to despair that so much trivial material makes it to the Front Page, and there seems to be no way of stopping it.
There is no doubt in my mind that the community has been diluted in its intent, purpose and interest. Often the new people have insightful and interesting things to say, but the focus is largely gone as compared to what attracted people in the first place.
One can no longer assume that just because an item has a high score, it must be of value. The interesting thing is that this is true of the Classic page as well.
And I've checked my snapshots from 2 years ago, and it really does seem to have changed.
People are upvoting things not because they are valuable, but because they are entertaining.
> People are upvoting things not because they are valuable, but because they are entertaining.
That's the biggest change I've noticed as well, and I would expand your observation to cover comments too. it seems like jokes get upvoted significantly more often now than they did a year or two ago.
From a top-down perspective the karma vote are less meaningful, as certain topics and sources get up voted ad nauseum. But from the bottom-up perspective, it's still great when you pluck an academic article or technical blog from obscurity and thousands of people read it, sending the karma from 1 to hundreds. And there are other people trying to do the same thing. You can usually avoid the chaff just by reading the title or domain (personally i skip the 'motivational' type blogs and try to resist the 'hot topic' ones and contentious debates, but there's still so much good technical content that crops up, and fairy high maturity among commenters).
What happens if blogging tools become their own HN post bots?
The last few Dave Winer posts I've seen here have been submitted by davewiner. Since he's a dude who rolls his own blogging tools, I'd be not at all surprised to find that he wired up the ability to simultaneously publish and post a link to HN.
I can see good reasons for doing this for one's own blog, but if this practice were widespread or built into normal people's blogging tools then it would (among other things) cause the "new" page here to be useless.
I am a long time lurker on hn, and like mzl, dont care about karma at all.
reading the ~160 comments on the topic, however, sounds weird to me because being indian, karma is not just a number against your online profile, but a fact of life - a word that you hear from people several times during a normal day - and they've probably never even been online.
i get that its about measuring the overall place of a person in a community, and that "karma" is as good a tag as any to condense that concept into one word, but it just seems very weird when there's so much debate around it. true karma is not exactly the "double-entry book keeping of life", nor does it have a leaderboard (which, btw, i realized existed on hn only recently).
on hn, the linked content's mostly great and its always useful to check the comments before loading up the link itself. that should be enough, imo.
ps: yes, i feel the same way watching "my name is earl", although i do enjoy the show itself.
Would have been extremely ironic if this post had been submitted by a bot!
My vote/suggestion is to hide Karma from all users once it reaches a fairly low cap. I know I am in a minority here but to me personally Karma beyond the level needed to downvote and basic functionality is hardly an issue.
Always surprised me how advanced humans pretend to be and how simple-minded they actually appear en masse, with this race to "get my integer number higher" which is a basis of most social algorithms.
Really people? That is the only way to stand out from the crowd? An integer? :)
Is HN karma worth anything? Don't get me wrong. I love HN and I think it is unique in its way but I never thought that I could earn a medal because of a lot karma on HN.
I can understand this "function" on StackOverflow (even though I don't have much karma there either) cause karma at StackOverflow can bring in new chances.
My question: Do anyone use HN karma as measurement to see if this guy is worth to hire or worth for something else?
Maybe a simple rule could be that if you run an undeclared bot on HN to auto submit stuff that you forfeit your account when you're detected, no matter who you are or what you've done.
That way we only get really clever bots that are indistinguishable from really good submitters.
Why? I haven't read a good argument against bots. Your article doesn't present an argument that HN is harmed. I haven't read a good argument that anyone is harmed.
If a bot had its own novelty account, say "ragnawald_speaks" that submitted everything I wrote, what would be the harm to HN?
People keep talking about "spam." How is it spam if a bot submits an article that has an excellent chance of making it to the top ten? That's the opposite of spam, it's all signal and very little noise.
If people think that a bot auto-submitting a feed with excellent signal is spam, then I have something very serious to tell them: humans are pattern-matching machines too.
The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did this.
In fact, I seem to recall Digg is going to/already has pulled back it's feature where you can register an RSS feed to post all your content for this very reason.
The argument against bots would be that it makes it more difficult to go through the 'new' section and find quality posts to up vote if everyone did this.
If everyone wrote bots that auto-submitted feeds from authors who consistently get upvotes from HN readers? How is that a problem?
If the problem is submitting articles that HN readers don't find interesting--spam, not ham--banning bots is unlikely to help. How do you stop me from submitting every article I write?
There is a huge amount of content out there loosely relevant to HN readers. Bits overwhelming the new page are a symptom, not a disease. The disease is that the new page doesn't scale well to handle a large volume of submissions. As HN grows, the number of submission si going to grow as well, with or without bots.
Behind the scenes, there must be some changes to accomodate this, such as algorithmically showing users new stories they are most likely to find interesting, or showing users a random selection fo new stories from the last hour.
Bots merely accelerate the decline of the new page's usefulness. Banning bots that auto-submit high quality feeds isn't going to work if we allow HN to grow at its current rate.
The quality of HN would be harmed. We'd end up with a very tedious site.
People often behave like sheep - the fact that a lot of articles are voted up isn't a reflection of quality, it's a reflection of familiarity and unthinking, sycophantic behaviour.
A large majority of these articles aren't actually discussing anything interesting - and it seems that their main purpose is to generate buzz and self-promote.
People often behave like sheep - the fact that a lot of articles are voted up isn't a reflection of quality, it's a reflection of familiarity and unthinking, sycophantic behaviour.
If this is true, then the problem is with the users of the site, not with bots that correctly submit stories garnering upvotes. Remember, this post is not about bots that submit spamvertising for Rolex knock-off watches, it's about bots that accumulate karma by submitting stories that consistently hit the top of the page.
Why are we trying to game the behaviour of HN readers by artificially throttling the submission of stories they find interesting? Far better to take a step back and ask whether HN is in danger of experiencing its Eternal September.
If the behaviour of HN is such that posts can hit #1 while still being undesirable for some reason--like the 47th straight article slamming an overfunded startup--then there is an issue, but surely it isn't the bot's fault any more than it would be a person's fault if they submitted it by hand.
Wait a second, it is completely that person's fault, don't you think? People have a responsibility to submit well-considered, high-quality links. Granted, a lot of people completely abdicate that responsibility and submit whatever strikes their fancy, but it doesn't mean the responsibility went away; with whom else would it lie? The guy submitting that 47th article is being a dick.
"If this is true, then the problem is with the users of the site, not with bots that correctly submit stories garnering upvotes. "
But bots do the bidding of humans ;)
As well as sheep-like behaviour, we're often also egotistical and care deeply about the tokens that are used to pass judgement on our place in the world; tokens such as karma.
I think that there's a lot of content on HN that isn't about interesting ideas; there's a lot of mediocre content that is created to self-promote, because some authors' find it gratifying to see their posts do well within the community. Imo, this kind of behaviour is dull.
Perhaps the solution would be to allow people to vote-down articles they deem uninteresting.
As well as sheep-like behaviour, we're often also egotistical and care deeply about the tokens that are used to pass judgement on our place in the world; tokens such as karma.
I think you're right, but don't forget the irresistable temptation of playing the game. Imagine you build a box with an LED display that shows a number, let's say 42. On the box are various switches, sliders, levers, knobs, &c. You place the box in a public area, suitably hardened against vandalism. Inevitably some bored person decides it is not a bomb and flicks a switch. The number goes to 50. He plays with the controls and the number rises and/or falls.
I put it to you that people will treat it as a puzzle where the goal is to display the biggest number, even if you don't say so. Some folks will try to display the smallest number, a little like trying for the low hand in hi-low poker.
As I said, I think you're right, but I wouldn't discount the number of people who simply treat karma as a game simply because... It's a number they can influence through the knobs and switches of submissions and comments.
I just figured that since I submitted this article myself it would be pretty silly to stay out of the comments. Don't take it as a religious thing, I've cut down the time spent on HN by over 90%, I have lots more time to write about other stuff now and I have more time for the people around me. On top of that my out-of-band contacts with HN'ers seem to have only strengthened.
Are there indications that this is a wider spread problem beyond jacquesmattheij.com or the two individuals that have already been caught doing it with his site?
One is an anomaly, two independent occurrences is a trend?
I never knew this, thanks for highlighting it and writing a nice post about it. That's why I read hackernews, to find out things I don't know from people who know them.
Didn't pg admit that he uses karma as a criteria in evaluating yc applications? If so that was just an invitation to a bunch of smart hackers to try to game the system.
No, he said that karma as nothing to do with YC application, but that if he sees an application from a user that he knows from HN to be a smart guy, he will look at it more specifically.
In other words, interesting, on-topic, and frequent comments are important, not your absolute karma number, even though of course you're likely to have a high karma if you're a frequent poster of good comments.
That's also why the average is more important than the absolute karma.
That's never made any sense to me. All it does is encourage this kind of behavior, where you submit everything you can find in the hopes of gaining points. You haven't really contributed anything valuable, since good articles tend to find their way here on their own.
Karma for comments makes sense. You can look at somebody's average and it gives you a sense of what sort of things they're posting. It actually measures something.
If somebody posts a cheap attack on one of your comments, you can click their username, notice that they have a 1.9 average, and go about your day knowing that they're probably just angry with the world in general. On the other hand if they have an average score of 8.6, you might want to read what they said again and see if they were actually right.
Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?